Harassment impacts the safety and well-being of young adults in Pakistan. Prior research has largely focused on women, often imposing external definitions of harm and overlooking how individuals themselves understand and respond to harassment. This study examines how Pakistani young adults define, experience, and cope with harassment. Drawing on 33 semi-structured interviews guided by a human-centered threat modeling framework, we surface context-specific threat models. Participants’ definitions of harassment were shaped by gender norms, religious values, and moral judgments. Women described harassment as a routine part of life, tied to public visibility, modesty norms. Men also reported harassment, though framed by different dynamics such as pressure to maintain control, avoid vulnerability, and conform to masculinity. Across participants, formal reporting pathways were viewed as untrustworthy or unsafe. Our findings highlight the need for interventions that reflect local definitions of harm, address relational adversaries, and support safety within sociocultural contexts.

This work explores the security and privacy perceptions, practices, and challenges Pakistani immigrants face in the US. We also explore how parent-child dynamics affect immi-grants' learning about and adaptation to security and privacy practices in the US. Through 25 semi-structured interviews with Pakistani immigrants, we find that first-generation immigrants perceive heightened risks of discrimination, surveillance, and isolation due to their status as Muslim immigrants. They also report tensions regarding self-expression and self-censorship in online settings. In contrast, second-generation immigrants quickly adapt to life in the US and do not perceive most of these challenges. We find that first- and second-generation immigrants mutually support each other in learning to use technology and reacting to perceived threats. Our findings underscore an urgent need for tailored digital safety initiatives and designs that consider the unique needs of at-risk populations to ensure their security and privacy. Recognizing and addressing these challenges can foster more inclusive digital landscapes, empowering immigrant populations with resilience and agency.

Human-centered threat modeling is a practice that researchers use to identify security and privacy threats to people, as well as ways to mitigate those threats. Often this may be the first step toward understanding the security and privacy needs, perspectives, experiences, and practices of a group or community, so that researchers can learn how to better improve their overall safety. However, research in this area is relatively ad hoc as compared to the more well-developed field of threat modeling for systems, leading to a fragmented and incomplete understanding of how researchers should engage in this endeavor. The goal of this work is to systematize the practice of human-centered threat modeling, identifying the core components of a human-centered threat modeling exercise by studying the practices of researchers in the area. We gathered a corpus of 78 papers in this area, using qualitative analysis to understand the practices used by researchers to elicit a threat model. Our results include a framework for human-centered threat modeling, a guide for using the framework that is grounded in best practices, and a description of how human-centered threat modeling differs from systems threat modeling. Our work can be used to guide new and experienced researchers in the field as they work to center human safety in their practices.